


Love Leaves A Memory

by delilahbelle



Category: Agent Carter - Fandom, Captain America: The First Avenger - Fandom, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-05
Updated: 2015-08-05
Packaged: 2018-04-13 01:50:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4503204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delilahbelle/pseuds/delilahbelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They want to talk to her about the type of man Captain America was for the latest documentary, but no one wants to hear about Steve Rogers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Leaves A Memory

One Monday morning, Peggy puts on her sharpest suit, does her hair and makeup, and heads off to the address Howard gave her. She doesn't want to do this, but she promised, so she knocks on the studio door and is greeted enthusiastically by a young man with a camera.

“Thank you for talking to us about Captain America, Agent Carter,” the man says. “The Howling Commandos didn't feel comfortable with us.”

Peggy knows why—they wanted to talk about Steve Rogers, not Captain America. They wanted to talk about the man who sketched pictures of them in between battles for them to send to their families back home. Who tugged at his collar when confronted by attractive appreciative women. The man who laughingly got in the middle of fights with Howard and Peggy to tell her Howard's latest terrible comment wasn't worth her being court-martialed for killing him. The man who bantered endlessly with Sergeant Barnes about their childhoods and their teenage years and the way that Howard couldn't build a flying car. They wanted to share stories about the man who cried when he couldn't save enough people in France, who laughed with abandon, who loved so deeply.

Yes, she knew why they didn't feel comfortable.

She wanted to talk about how silly he felt in that costume or his general dislike of the way he was paraded around. She wanted to share the way he used to look at her so sweetly she thought she might burst and how he hesitantly kissed her for a second time, when the adrenaline of battle had worn off and he wasn't sure what to do anymore. She needed to tell them that he said he would have walked to Austria just to find out if Barnes was alive. She wanted to share his love of art, the look of wonder on his face when he realized he could see color for the first time, the portrait he drew of her with the colored pencils she spent most of her monthly stipend on to give him, the one with her in a red dress and red lips, looking for all the world like she was having the time of her life. Or the portrait of her in her uniform, gun poised, or the one of her smiling the way she knows she smiled at him. She wanted to talk about how everyone in their regiment would come to him for portraits for their loved ones, offering money or other compensation, how he wouldn't take anything, how when he ran out of paper or pencils the men would pool their money together to buy some so he could still draw them. How he used to send finished portraits to their families even if the men died before they were finished, the postage for the extra paper taken out of his stipend. How he would lose sleep to do this for them, the sole kind thing he could do as a soldier. She thought she should share how he looked all curled up in misery over the dead, soft and sweet and childlike and so, so broken, only human after all.

But they don't want to know these things. They don't want to know how he kissed, soft and sweet and innocent, and they don't want to hear that he couldn't talk to women if his life depended on it. They don't want to hear about how he hated the killing and destruction, about how he wanted to save the world if he could, about how he wouldn't listen to their commanding officers. They don't want to know that his last words were a promise to her they both knew he wouldn't be able to keep.

So she tells them what they want to know instead. It's easier than she expected—none of it is a lie, really. It's harder than she expected—this is the very shell of him during a small period of his life and nothing more. She says he was a good man for a woman to have because she can't bring herself to say he was a flirt, like people want him to be. She tells them he was patriotic and kind and selfless. She tells them how deeply he believed in a better tomorrow, in a people who did not torment fellow man. She tells them how dutifully he fought and how he wanted to save everyone. She spoke of his courage and his recklessness. She spoke of his stubborn bravery and his tenacity and audacity. She tells them how much he did for them, how just his presence would raise their armies' spirits, how he could rally people to him like a shining beacon.

It was all true, but it didn't touch upon the man who gave himself to a world who gave him nothing back. But thinking about that will only make her miserable. She has a brand-new husband at home, a man she loves, a man who knows war, a man who is kind and brave and loving. He deserves more than a wife who will sink back into a ten year old misery. She cannot cry the way she did the first time she heard a retrospection on the radio where they played a part of his show; she does not want to feel that despair and anger fighting in her. She does not want to clutch at the couch as if that would ground her or be pulled into Howard's well-meaning arms as he tries to find words to comfort her. She does not want to lay in bed, exhausted by grief, and sleep only to dream of a man whose grave is somewhere in the ocean. She does not want to relive the way the last of her hope extinguished when she poured his blood into the river. She does not have the energy to handle that anguish again.

When she leaves, she does not cry. She walks to the subway, takes a train back to her neighborhood. She marches up to her room and takes out his portraits of her. She had them framed when she returned, and she wishes they hadn't been weathered in the war. Some of the pencil marks had faded, but she didn't dare fix them. Everything was to remain by his hand. She brushes her fingertips against where he signed his name. She pulls the one of her smiling to the front, the one where her eyes are lidded with passion and the tilt of her mouth suggests a fond amusement. 

Only then does she let herself cry.


End file.
